Petition calling for public country-by-country tax reporting by multinationals (Public CBCR)

European Federation of Public Service Unions

We are getting in touch about our petition calling for public country-by-country tax reporting by multinationals (Public CBCR) http://www.epsu.org/a/11918, an essential tool to fight corporate tax avoidance that costs billions of Euros every year.

The petition calls for EU legislation to force multinationals to publish information on each country where they do business: their sales, turnover, profits, company subsidiaries, tax payments (including tax rulings), public subsidies and the number of their employees.

Public CBCR has been a long standing demand of tax justice campaigners. It is also relevant to collective bargaining as it would allow trade unions to have information about how much profits companies make and where.

The Commission is likely to submit  a proposal on public CBCR on 12 April. However, a leaked proposal indicates that it is likely to fall short of our demands.  The reason for this is that the scope of the disclosure rules will be limited to activities within Europe, leaving a lack of transparency on profit shifting to non-EU tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. Yet we know that  companies such as McDonald’s, Ikea, Google etc shift profits not only to tax friendly EU countries but also outside i.e. Switzerland, Delaware, Bermuda, Cayman islands etc. In fact, it is usually through a combination of EU and non EU corporate tax havens that companies succeed in lowering their corprate tax bills near 0.

Ahead of 12 April , we must send a strong message to both the Commission and member states that there is widespread support for a public CBCR that is much broader than currently proposed.

 This is the last opportunity for some time to win this measure, whilst it is difficult to tell how much money public CBCR will help bring back to public revenues, it is clear that without it, we will not get it back!

The  US government, amongst others,  is reported to be actively  lobbying the EU to keep public CBCR within the EU only to avoid having any or very little impact on US corporations, see here http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/03/22/the-eu-is-going-to-fail-on-country-by-country-reporting/

Please sign and circulate the petition available in Italian, German, Swedish, Spanish, French and English 

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Nadja nsalson@epsu.org or Patrick orrp@epsu.org  if you need more information about the issue or help with circulating. We have graphics for social media that can be provided and can help too with embedding the petition.

Best,

In peace and solidarity

Jan Willem Goudriaan

EPSU General Secretary